When she opened her eyes the moon had come out from behind a cloud, and the trees above them were bathed in a silver light. Stuart wrapped one of the blankets round her tightly and his cheek against hers was damp with tears.
‘The magic is still there,’ he whispered. ‘You brought it back with you.’
They put their clothes back on, and wrapping the blankets round them went to sit on the bench. The moon was casting a silver path across the black water of the loch and an owl hooted somewhere nearby.
‘What was your contingency plan?’ he asked, as she snuggled into his shoulder.
‘I’ve booked a room back in Taynuilt for two nights,’ she said.
‘How resourceful of you! And after that?’
‘I’ll go back to London on Monday when you go off to Oban.’
He looked down at her, and she could feel his anxiety. ‘And then?’ he asked.
‘Whatever you want,’ she said, reaching up to trace around his lips with one finger.
‘I want you here, with me, for ever,’ he said, taking her fingertips and kissing them.
Other men, both before she first met Stuart and after they split up, had said such things after lovemaking, but invariably she sensed they said it to all their lovers. She believed Stuart meant it, though. He never said anything he didn’t mean.
‘That’s what I hoped you’d say,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll give you a cooling-off period first, but if you still want me, then I’ll come back. I expect we could rent a little place in Oban for the winter, couldn’t we?’
‘You’d better buy some warm clothes in London then,’ he said, excitement in his voice. ‘Next spring we’ll come back here with a caravan and live like a couple of hippies while we do it up.’
Laura glanced around her, saw the bushes lit up by the candles and the fire, and she could imagine how lovely it would be in summer. She would love to learn to lay bricks, to mix concrete and study the mysteries of plumbing; it would be the greatest challenge of her life to help make their own paradise.
‘I think we’d better go now, before we turn to blocks of ice,’ she said. She got up and tipped the pail of water over the fire to put it out.
Stuart handed her one candle, but blew out all the others, and picking up the box of remaining food led her back to the cottage to lock it up.
She waited outside while he went in to collect a bag, and she turned to look at the loch again. The moonlight on the water brought a lump to her throat for it looked like a beautiful silver path, and it seemed to confirm that she had finally found her right road in life. The past was no importance, she could let it go and look only to the future.
Stuart had told her to have faith in him. It had wavered sometimes, but she knew now, without any doubt, that if you had enough faith, all dreams could come true.
She could hear Stuart shuffling about in the cottage and a bright beam of light came on as he found his torch. She knew with utter conviction that she loved him and belonged with him, and that she was prepared to go with him anywhere he wanted to be.
It was a defining moment for her, for she’d never had that kind of certainty and faith before.
He came out of the cottage and locked the back door.
‘Ready?’ he said.
‘For anything,’ she replied.
Epilogue
1997
Laura paused as she came out through the French windows into the garden with a tray loaded with a bottle of wine, a jug of fruit squash, glasses and a platter of nibbles for her guests.
It was a glorious August morning, warm and sunny without a cloud in the sky. Jack and Harry, her two nephews, were out on the loch in the rowing boat with Stuart. The boys’ shrill, excited voices carried clearly on the slight breeze as they struggled with learning to row in tandem. Stuart was seated in the stern and every now and then his much deeper voice could be heard giving instructions.
Meggie and Ivy were sitting on steamer chairs down by the small jetty, but Laura thought Ivy looked a little tense as she kept a close eye on her sons.
‘They are perfectly safe,’ Laura called out as she came down the garden with her tray. ‘They’ve got life jackets on, and they can swim, but Stuart won’t let them fall in, so you can relax.’
Ivy looked round, flipping her sunglasses up on to her head. ‘It’s the mother’s curse, always thinking our kids are in permanent danger,’ she said with a grin.
‘That curse must have missed out on our mother then,’ Meggie said drily. ‘I don’t remember her ever worrying about us.’
‘That’s because she rarely came out of the house to see what we were up to,’ Ivy retorted. ‘Anyway, it’s one thing to learn to row on a pond in a park, quite another to be out on a vast loch. I’d just feel happier if Derek and James were here too.’
‘They’ll be back soon,’ Laura said, putting the tray down on a small table by her sisters. ‘In the meantime have a glass of wine and a little faith in Stuart. Boys need to do stuff like rowing, climbing trees and lighting fires, it’s character-building.’
Her sisters, their men and the boys had arrived two days ago for a holiday. The year before, Meggie had come up with James, the policeman she’d met after Robbie Fielding attacked Laura, but the cottage wasn’t finished then and they’d stayed nearby in a guest house. But all the work was completed now, and it was thrilling for Laura to be able to have her family here together. Ivy, Derek and the boys were staying in the caravan that had been Laura and Stuart’s home for over a year, and Meggie and James had the spare room in the cottage.
Derek and James had gone off to buy some beer and a few groceries in the village, and they had a barbecue planned for later in the afternoon. Laura was so happy that she felt she might burst with it.
The last two years hadn’t all been plain sailing for her and Stuart. The two snatched years of her life in prison had made her introspective, insecure and often irrational. She had come back from London to live with Stuart in Oban just a month after she was exonerated, because she couldn’t bear to be apart from him. But though it was wonderful to be together, she hadn’t taken into account the long hours of separation while he was working, the bitter winter weather, or how bored she’d become in the little seaside town without any work or even friends.
They’d had a few very heated arguments when she accused him of caring more about his work than her. But fate stepped in just in time, when she saw an article in a magazine about a drug project in Glasgow that needed volunteers interested in helping young people.
She applied and was accepted, and after a short induction, found herself spending two days a week at a drop-in centre where addicts could go to exchange dirty needles for clean ones, receive some counselling and discuss their problems.
From her first day there, Laura sensed that she had all the right credentials to become a counsellor herself. She knew why people took the first step on the road to addiction, and the forces which kept them there. She recognized her younger self in so many of the younger addicts she met.
In February 1996 Belle stood trial. The charge had been dropped to manslaughter in the case of Jackie’s death, but still held at attempted murder of Stuart. Both Laura and Stuart were witnesses for the prosecution, but once they had given their evidence they left the court, not staying to watch the rest of the trial or hear the guilty verdict.
For Laura it was a trip back to a dark place she wanted to forget she’d ever been in. She could take no pleasure in seeing Belle stripped of her former glamour, gaunt, stringy-haired and with dark-ringed eyes, knowing that even her mother and brother had abandoned her. Toby had made a statement to the police that she had taken full advantage of getting power of attorney over her mother’s finances, and plundered a great deal of the money from the sale of the house in Duke’s Avenue. Toby hadn’t discovered this until Belle was arrested, but as soon as he found out, he came over to England and after making his statement, took Lena back to live with him, his wife and new baby in Australia.
> Belle received an eighteen-year prison sentence. People remarked that they thought it was too lenient, but then they didn’t know that eighteen years or life made little difference at Belle’s age. She had even fewer reserves with which to cope with prison life than Laura had; she would spend each day in abject misery, and that was the real punishment.
As for Charles, he received ten years in total for concealing a crime in the case of Jackie, for aiding and abetting the attempted murder of Stuart, and for dangerous driving and failing to stop when he killed Barney.
Laura had mixed feelings about his sentence. It didn’t seem much for the loss of her son, yet he had pleaded guilty to that, and showed real remorse. Stuart, who had seen him in the dock, said he looked so old and sick he doubted he’d live to finish his sentence.
In May of the previous year, Stuart had finished his work in Oban and was ready to start work on the cottage. They bought a caravan and tucked it down amongst the trees at the side of the garden, and with two local men, Stuart began to dig the foundations for the extension to the cottage.
Around that time all the legalities of Jackie’s will had been finalized and Laura and her sisters put Brodie Farm and Kirkmay House in the hands of a lawyer in Fife for them to be sold.
All through that summer Laura was away in Glasgow for three days a week, staying overnight in a small guest house. Along with her volunteer work at the centre, she got herself on a counselling course and studied hard. The other four days of the week she was home with Stuart, helping to mix concrete, collecting building materials, and tending the areas of the garden that weren’t part of the building site.
In October Brodie Farm was finally sold, and Laura passed her counselling course with flying colours. The cottage was coming on in leaps and bounds, and Stuart predicted they’d be able to be in there by Christmas. Laura got back from Glasgow one evening to find the plastering had been finished and the bathroom suite installed. Nothing was more exciting than their first bath, even if the floor was still rough concrete, for the shower in the caravan was tiny and the hot water erratic. They lit dozens of candles and lay either end of the bath drinking wine, and she told Stuart how clever and hard-working he’d been, and he said she was his inspiration.
It was just before Christmas in the drop-in centre, as she listened to a group of addicts talking amongst themselves, that she suddenly realized she wasn’t entirely committed to the work there.
Maybe, as several friends suggested, she wanted to be at home looking at paint charts, watching Stuart painstakingly build their kitchen, or choosing curtains and furniture, but she didn’t think so.
While it was true she didn’t like being away from him, it was more than that. She could see so clearly that in five or ten years from now, some of the group she heard talking would be dead. The rest would have slid even further down the slope, and she doubted that any of them would have recovered and be leading useful, happy and healthy lives.
She felt ashamed that she couldn’t be more optimistic, but the statistics of recovery amongst addicts from deprived backgrounds proved she was right. It struck her that she should put her energy into some project that dissuaded youngsters from taking that first step on the rocky road to addiction.
They moved into the cottage for Christmas. The newly plastered walls were all white, they had the wood floors Laura had suggested, and the kitchen and sitting room, now the cottage had been extended at the back, seemed vast because they had so little furniture. They bought a huge Christmas tree, adorned the mantelpiece of the lovely old fireplace with green garlands, and laid a big shaggy cream rug in front of it, on which they made love on Christmas Eve by the light of the tree lights. There were no curtains, but then they didn’t want to shut out the view of the moonlight on the loch. And later that evening, as Laura lounged on a bean bag while Stuart played his guitar, she thought she was the luckiest woman in the world.
In the New Year they went down to Edinburgh for a few days to buy furniture and see some old friends. They took a trip out to Crail to visit Barney’s grave, and while they were there they met Ted Baxter for lunch in St Andrews. It was good to find him much happier: he and Peggie were getting along much better, she was cooking again, going out with Ted in the car, and their first grandchild was expected in a few weeks’ time.
They had only been back at the cottage for one night when Meggie rang to say June had been taken to hospital with a heart attack but died on the way there.
They drove down to London, and though Laura believed she would feel very little sorrow at losing her mother, once she was there with Meggie and Ivy, she found that wasn’t so. All three of them went through a whole gamut of emotions – relief that they no longer had to feel guilty about the way she had lived in the last twenty years, anger at past neglect and selfishness, but love too. Stuart had people to see while they were there, and the sisters spent the days before June’s funeral talking through their memories, bitter and sweet, together.
James used his police contacts to try to trace Mark and Paul, without success, but Freddy came up the night before the funeral, and Laura was able to make her peace with him at last. It was so odd to be confronted with a man of forty when all her memories were of a chubby toddler. He was tall, fit and handsome, still retaining his thick dark hair, a good family man and a well-respected naval officer, and once she’d had an opportunity to talk to him alone and say how much she regretted not keeping him in her life, he hugged her and said it didn’t matter any more.
There were few mourners at the crematorium, just a few of June’s neighbours and family. Freddy had put together a few well-chosen words about her, focusing on humorous anecdotes from the long distant past that touched everyone. They went back to Meggie’s house afterwards and it became a real party after a few drinks had flowed. At one point Stuart had an arm-wrestling competition with Freddy in the kitchen.
‘Mum would’ve liked this,’ Ivy remarked, looking around at her boys playing Snakes and Ladders on the floor while all the adults milled around chatting nineteen to the dozen. ‘She loved nothing better than dressing up and going to a party. I think we should just remember her like that, drink in one hand, fag in the other, blonde hair, high heels and a dress with a bit of glitter on it. Let’s forget the rest.’
It was on the long drive back to Scotland after the funeral that Laura began reflecting on the way her, Meggie, Ivy and Freddy’s lives had turned out. All four of them could easily have ended up like some of the people she’d met in the Glasgow centre, for they had all been vulnerable, exposed to crime and poverty, and without parental guidance.
She started to trace back and find reasons why they hadn’t and she came to the conclusion that each of them had had a good influence during their adolescence.
Freddy had joined the Navy at a young age, Ivy had Meggie pushing her into college and lifting her horizons. Meggie had her older sister’s influence, and Laura had had Lena, Frank and Jackie.
It struck her then that this was what she should be doing with the rest of her life, and the knowledge she had. To concentrate on equally vulnerable children, to give them something in their lives that would lift them up and give them a glimpse of a better way of life than they’d been born to.
She continued her work at the centre right through to May, but each time she went over to Glasgow she was putting out feelers, talking to people, thinking deeply about what could be done. Yet it was the four days a week back by the loch that gave her the idea she was now burning to start on.
For her the first summer here, waking to birdsong each morning, tramping through dew-soaked grass, revelling in the majesty of the scenery, the total lack of luxury, shops or man-made entertainment, had been a healing process. She’d learned to saw wood, to lay a few bricks, to dig, and had acquired some knowledge of plumbing. If she could give inner-city, deprived children just a little taste of that, along with the healthy fun of swimming, boating, climbing trees and campfires, maybe they wouldn’t want to spend afternoo
ns in back alleys sniffing glue and gravitate to other even more dangerous drugs, prostitution and crime.
She had the money from her inheritance from Jackie in the bank – she’d only spent a little of it on furniture and curtains – and Stuart was so proud of keeping his woman that he’d always want to be the main provider. She was also expecting to get compensation for being wrongfully imprisoned.
She could buy a piece of land somewhere beautiful and if she approached the right people she’d obtain the support and further finance to get it going and keep it going.
Jackie would have wholeheartedly loved the idea of holidays for deprived children, so it seemed a fitting thing to put her money into. The kids could camp at first while helping with the building, spending whole summers learning useful skills while they had a great time too. Students would gladly come and help out for pocket money, teaching orienteering, canoeing, climbing, and heaven knew what else.
She had half expected Stuart to scoff at her idea, or at least to say that now they had a lovely home he was hoping that they would just do nothing but enjoy themselves.
But he didn’t.
His eyes lit up, and the next thing she knew he was suggesting he’d like nothing better than to spend six weeks a year playing Boy Scout leader.
‘David would like it too, and maybe James and Meggie as well,’ he went on. ‘I could get some of the companies I’ve worked for to donate building materials or plant hire. They’d love it; they might even take on some of the keen kids as apprentices later on. The only real problem would be getting the council to agree to use land in an area of outstanding beauty for such a project, because you’ve obviously got to build some permanent structures, toilet blocks, kitchens and stuff. But they might be okay about it if it was log cabin-style and only used for part of the year.’
It occurred to Laura later that they both wanted this because they had no children of their own. Maybe she needed to lavish some love and care on neglected children as a way of proving herself to Barney. Stuart too had a surplus of love and patience that needed an outlet.
Faith Page 57